173 research outputs found
Esophageal caustic injuries in pediatrics: a sobering global health issue
No full textCaustic material ingestion by children is considered a global healthcare issue, especially in low-to-middle income countries. The aim of this article was to review the epidemiology, prevention, and management of caustic material ingestion in pediatric patients, comparing low-to-middle income countries with high-income countries. We conducted an English literature review using PubMed with the following keywords: (caustic OR corrosive) AND ingestion AND (pediatric OR pediatric). Our search retrieved 253 citations; all abstracts were screened by the authors, and 52 articles were finally included in our review. Prevention is key in tackling this issue, but legislation is scarce in low-to-middle income countries. Diagnosis of caustic ingestion is mostly achieved using flexible endoscopy, computed tomography, and endoscopic ultrasound, but access is limited in low-to middle income countries and diagnosis is often delayed. After stabilizing patients, the mainstay of treatment is graded endoscopic dilatation, and rarely, esophageal replacement. We concluded that caustic ingestion represents a serious condition where prevention is the key. Once a child suffers an injury, rapid and careful evaluation of the injury with endoscopy, and a course of close observation and dilations if needed, will often avoid esophageal replacement. When necessary, the stomach is the best first option if it is viable, followed by the colon, and finally, the jejunum
MAGNET: understanding and improving the accuracy of genome pre-alignment filtering
No full textIn the era of high throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) technologies, calculating the edit distance (i.e.,the minimum number of substitutions, insertions, and deletionsbetween a pair of sequences) forbillions of genomicsequences is the computational bottleneck intoday’s read mappers. The shifted Hamming distance (SHD) algorithm proposes afast filtering strategy that can rapidly filter out invalid mappings that have more edits than allowed. However, SHD shows high inaccuracy in its filtering by admitting invalid mappings to be marked as correct ones. This wastesthe execution time and imposesa large computational burden. In this work, we comprehensively investigate foursources that lead to the filtering inaccuracy. We propose MAGNET, anewfiltering strategy that maintains high accuracy across different edit distance thresholds and data sets. It significantly improvestheaccuracy of pre-alignment filtering by one to twoordersof magnitude.The MATLAB implementationsof MAGNETand SHDareopen source and available at:https://github.com/BilkentCompGen/MAGNET
Mechanisms of body fat distribution and gluteal-femoral fat protection against metabolic disorders
No full textObesity is a major health problem that affects millions of individuals, and it is associated with metabolic diseases including insulin resistance (IR), type 2 diabetes (T2D), and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, Body fat distribution (BFD) rather than crude obesity is now considered as a more accurate factor associated with these diseases. The factors affecting BFD vary, from genetic background, epigenetic factors, ethnicity, aging, hormonal changes, to lifestyle and medication consumptions. The main goal of controlling BFD comes from the fact that fat accumulation in different depots has a different effect on the overall health and metabolic health of individuals. It is well established that fat storage in the abdominal visceral depot is associated with metabolic disorder occurrence, while gluteal-femoral subcutaneous fat depot seems to be protective against these diseases. In this paper, we will summarize the factors affecting fat distribution. Then, we will present evidence connecting gluteal-femoral fat depot with protection against metabolic disorders including IR, T2D, and CVDs. Finally, we will list the suggested mechanisms that lead to this protective effect. The abstract is visualized in Graphical Abstract.The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) (grant no. NPRP13S-1230-190008).Scopu
pLUTo: Enabling Massively Parallel Computation in DRAM via Lookup Tables
No full textData movement between the main memory and the processor is a key contributor to execution time and energy consumption in memory-intensive applications. This data movement bottleneck can be alleviated using Processing-in-Memory (PiM). One category of PiM is Processing-using-Memory (PuM), in which computation takes place inside the memory array by exploiting intrinsic analog properties of the memory device. PuM yields high performance and energy efficiency, but existing PuM techniques support a limited range of operations. As a result, current PuM architectures cannot efficiently perform some complex operations (e.g., multiplication, division, exponentiation) without large increases in chip area and design complexity. To overcome these limitations of existing PuM architectures, we introduce pLUTo (processing-using-memory with lookup table (LUT) operations), a DRAM-based PuM architecture that leverages the high storage density of DRAM to enable the massively parallel storing and querying of lookup tables (LUTs). The key idea of pLUTo is to replace complex operations with low-cost, bulk memory reads (i.e., LUT queries) instead of relying on complex extra logic. We evaluate pLUTo across 11 real-world workloads that showcase the limitations of prior PuM approaches and show that our solution outperforms optimized CPU and GPU base-lines by an average of 713 × and 1.2 ×, respectively, while simultaneously reducing energy consumption by an average of 1855 × and 39.5 ×. Across these workloads, pLUTo outperforms state-of-the-art PiM architectures by an average of 18.3 ×. We also show that different versions of pLUTo provide different levels of flexibility and performance at different additional DRAM area overheads (between 10.2% and 23.1%). pLUTo's source code and all scripts required to reproduce the results of this paper are openly and fully available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/pLUTo. Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Computer Engineerin
The effect of the 50-day conflict in Gaza on children: a descriptive study
No full textBackground
The UN has estimated that the conflict in Gaza between July 8 and August 26, 2014, resulted in the deaths of 2204 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and permanent disabilities in thousands of people. The aim of this study was to describe the pattern and extent of effects on children from this attack.
Methods
We reviewed surveys and reports from governmental and international bodies (ministry of health and UN) and independent non-governmental organisations to compile statistics. Additionally, we reviewed the findings of 24 researchers who interviewed 430 eye witnesses of 144 Israeli attacks on civilian gatherings (houses, hospitals, schools, mosques, shops, and streets) in which at least two Palestinians were killed. We separated attacks that resulted in death of children (age <18 years). Each attack was categorised as being direct or indirect (direct attack means that bombing was intentional with no fighting in the vicinity) and we recorded whether a child was killed or injured and what the killed children were doing before attack.
Findings
530 children were killed, accounting for 24% of the 2147-total people killed. Children accounted for an estimated 30% (3303) of the 10 870 total people wounded. The field researchers of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor covered 338 (64%) of the total 530 children killed. They focused extensively on mass attacks because it was difficult to cover hundreds of attacks taking place at the same time for 50 days. 54 597 (90%) of the raids were judged to be direct and 53 990 (89%) of these were in densely populated areas. 297 (88%) of children who were killed died in their homes. 71 (21%) of these were sitting with their families; 95 (28%) were asleep; 34 (10%) were eating; 27 (8%) were watching television or using computers. 41 (12%) of the killed children died while fleeing their houses; 31 (6%) were killed while sheltering in basements or at UN Relief and Works Agency schools; 20 (6%) died while playing; and 31(9%) were killed while doing other activities. Furthermore, the UN reported that 373 000 children needed specialised psychological support and around 1000 children will suffer permanent disabilities.
Interpretation
Our findings suggest that children injured or killed accounted for a substantial proportion of civilian casualties during this conflict
Demeter: A Fast and Energy-Efficient Food Profiler Using Hyperdimensional Computing in Memory
No full textFood profiling is an essential step in any food monitoring system needed to prevent health risks and potential frauds in the food industry. Significant improvements in sequencing technologies are pushing food profiling to become the main computational bottleneck. State-of-the-art profilers are unfortunately too costly for food profiling. Our goal is to design a food profiler that solves the main limitations of existing profilers, namely (1) working on massive data structures and (2) incurring considerable data movement, for a real-time monitoring system. To this end, we propose Demeter, the first platform-independent framework for food profiling. Demeter overcomes the first limitation through the use of hyperdimensional computing (HDC) and efficiently performs the accurate few-species classification required in food profiling. We overcome the second limitation by the use of an in-memory hardware accelerator for Demeter (named Acc-Demeter) based on memristor devices. Acc-Demeter actualizes several domain-specific optimizations and exploits the inherent characteristics of memristors to improve the overall performance and energy consumption of Acc-Demeter. We compare Demeter’s accuracy with other industrial food profilers using detailed software modeling. We synthesize Acc-Demeter’s required hardware using UMC’s 65nm library by considering an accurate PCM model based on silicon-based prototypes. Our evaluations demonstrate that Acc-Demeter achieves a (1) throughput improvement of 192× and 724× and (2) memory reduction of 36× and 33× compared to Kraken2 and MetaCache (2 state-of-the-art profilers), respectively, on typical food-related databases. Demeter maintains an acceptable profiling accuracy (within 2% of existing tools) and incurs a very low area overhead.Computer EngineeringQuantum & Computer Engineerin
Investigaciones radiofónicas: de la radio a la radio indígena. Una revisión en Colombia y Latinoamérica
No full textEl artículo expone los resultados de una revisión documental sobre el tema de laradio indígena en Colombia. Para ello, en primer lugar, presenta las publicacionessobre radio en el país desde 1974 en adelante. En un segundo momento, observalas indagaciones realizadas en la relación medios de comunicación-indígenas. Alser el tema de la radio indígena una temática poco explorada en Colombia, muestrauna recopilación de pesquisas en esta materia en América Latina. Finalmente, da aconocer las investigaciones colombianas en esta línea y analiza las tensiones legalesde su eclosión. Concluye argumentando la necesidad de ampliar las iniciativas sobreradio indígena y propone observar cómo la cosmovisión de estos pueblos re-significael lenguaje y los formatos radiofónicos modernos
Importancia del chequeo oftalmológico en edades tempranas
No full textEn una Jornada Científica donde se expuso un trabajo seguido con un niño ambliopeen que se demostraba cómo la atención al niño en edad temprana erradicó laanomalía de que era portador, los participantes consideraron necesario que sedivulgara la importancia del chequeo oftalmológico en las edades tempranas.Dando cumplimiento a dicho reclamo, presentamos este trabajo, con él que nosproponemos hacer conscientes a los adultos mayores: padres, abuelos, tíos otutores de niños en edades tempranas (desde su nacimiento hastaaproximadamente los 4 años) de la importancia de un chequeo oftalmológico paradiagnosticar la normalidad o anomalías que con tratamiento a tiempo puedeneliminarse o al menos mejorarse.Consta de una exposición sobre el desarrollo de la visión, donde se señalan lasanomalías oftalmológicas que pueden presentarse en los niños de corta edad que alser diagnosticadas a tiempo pueden ser tratadas para su rehabilitación visual y la scielo.sld.cu78vía a seguir a partir de lo detectado, así como también la forma en que se atiendendichos niños en nuestro país.Palabras clave: Ambliopía, chequeo oftalmológico, anomalía
GateKeeper: a new hardware architecture for accelerating pre-alignment in DNA short read mapping
No full textHigh throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) technologies generate an excessive number of small DNA segments -called short reads- that cause significant computational burden. To analyze the entire genome, each of the billions of short reads must be mapped to a reference genome based on the similarity between a read and ‘candidate’ locations in that reference genome. The similarity measurement, called alignment, formulated as an approximate string matching problem, is the computational bottleneck because: (i) it is implemented using quadratic-time dynamic programming algorithms and (ii) the majority of candidate locations in the reference genome do not align with a given read due to high dissimilarity. Calculating the alignment of such incorrect candidate locations consumes an overwhelming majority of a modern read mapper’s execution time. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a fast and effective filter that can detect incorrect candidate locations and eliminate them before invoking computationally costly alignment algorithms
Relación Existente Entre Desarrollo Humano y Seguridad Humana
No full textEl desarrollo humano es un paradigma del desarrollo que se pone en vigencia hacia la segunda mitaddel siglo pasado a iniciativa de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas ONU.El presente trabajo resalta la importancia de que este paradigma del desarrollo tenga como centro alser humano y no al factor económico o social como era en anteriores paradigmas del desarrollo.Se aborda, además, el tema de la relación tan estrecha que existe entre ambas categorías expresandola forma en que la seguridad humana es una garantía que se debe cumplir para alcanzar el desarrollohumano.Así mismo se hace una breve descripción de cada una de las dimensiones de la seguridad humana y lainterdependencia que existe entre ellas.El artículo deja claro desde una postura epistemológica positivista que sin seguridad humana no haydesarrollo humano y que si bien la mayoría de los Estados del planeta tienen dentro de sus legislacionesleyes que les imponen deberes acerca del cumplimiento del bienestar de sus poblaciones, la realidad dejaen claro que aún persisten diferentes regiones del globo terrestre que aún cuentan con poblaciones queestán muriendo de desnutrición, hambre, violencia, sequías, conflictos armados, desordenes ambientalesy epidemias, entre otros.Se concluye expresando que hace falta una verdadera voluntad política de los diferentes gobiernos delmundo para erradicar los flagelos que impiden el desarrollo humano
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